Africa|Tunisia’s Democracy Is Tested, and Pulls Through, After a President’s Death

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Tunisia’s Democracy Is Tested, and Pulls Through, After a President’s Death

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Tunisians paid tribute to President Beji Caid Essebsi in Tunis on Friday. His funeral is Saturday.CreditCreditHassene Dridi/Associated Press

By Lilia Blaise

July 26, 2019

TUNIS — The death this week of Tunisia’s first democratically elected president accelerated the timetable for choosing his successor, placing new strain on a political system in which power is shared among several parties, many voters are disillusioned and leaders are confronting a struggling economy.

But if the death on Thursday of President Béji Caïd Essebsi, at age 92, shook up the only surviving democracy to emerge from the Arab Spring, the system worked as planned. The usually divided Parliament made a swift, orderly transfer of power, voting with little drama or opposition to make its leader, Mohammed Ennaceur, the interim president.

“Everyone was sad but at the same time proud to be Tunisian,” said Watfa Belaid, an adviser to Prime Minister Youssef Chahed. “I think we showed the entire world that the institutions which were born from our revolution are rock solid and that they work. We did this in a peaceful way.”

But greater challenges lie ahead for a young democracy so fractious that the Constitutional Court remains vacant five years after it was established, because Parliament cannot agree on naming its members.

Mr. Ennaceur, 85, is limited by the Tunisian Constitution to 90 days as interim president, so the country’s election authority moved the date of the presidential election to Sept. 15 from Nov. 17.

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Mr. Essebsi in 2011. The death of Mr. Essebsi, Tunisia’s first democratically elected president, has posed a challenge to the young democracy.CreditMoises Saman for The New York Times

The compressed campaign schedule may be all the more difficult to manage because the period for candidates to formally enter the race has not begun, and some possible contenders have not made their intentions clear. Legislative elections are also planned for October.

“This could be really challenging because every political party has to review its entire strategy and campaign,” said Larbi Chouikha, a political scientist and author. “Many of them were aiming at legislative elections to have a good base and then support a presidential candidate. This changes the whole dynamic.”

Several of the movements were brutally quashed by leaders who held onto power, but the longtime rulers of Egypt and Libya were overthrown. In Libya, the aftermath has been a long-running civil war; in Egypt, Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood took power in the country’s first free elections, but then were toppled and suppressed by the military.

But in Tunisia a multiparty democracy took hold, and in 2014 Mr. Essebsi won the country’s first free presidential election.

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Mr. Essebsi came to embody the ability to balance ideology, pragmatism and power in the name of unity, consensus and stability.CreditZoubeir Souissi/Reuters

Before his death, political tensions were running high in Tunisia. The prime minister, Mr. Chahed, broke away from the president’s secular Nidaa Tounes party and was elected as leader of a new party, Tahya Tounes, creating a source of friction that has been evident in Parliament.

Hostilities reached a climax when the government proposed amendments to the electoral law in June that would bar candidates for office who have worked in business, charities or civil society groups. The amendments appeared tailored to block the presidential candidacies of a media mogul, Nabil Karoui, and the founder of a cultural foundation, Olfa Ramburg.

Civil rights groups criticized the changes as anti-democratic and unfair in their timing, just a few months before the elections, though Parliament passed them and sent them to the president.

But before his death, Mr. Essebsi effectively blocked the amendments from taking effect by not acting on them. He did not take the steps that would have put the changes into law, send them back to Parliament for revision, or propose a referendum on the matter.

That makes the proposed electoral law changes into a problem inherited by the interim president.

“If the new president does not promulgate these amendments, he will disavow what his own Parliament voted,” said Mr. Chouikha, the political scientist. “If he does promulgate them, he will make strong political enemies. So even if we are in an emotional time and still in mourning, this raises challenges for the next step of the transition.”

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The interim president, Mohammed Ennaceur. “We showed the entire world that the institutions which were born from our revolution are rock solid,” Prime Minister Youssef Chahed said.CreditHassene Dridi/Associated Press

But others hope that the calm, follow-the-rules response to Mr. Essebsi’s death is an optimistic sign.

“We are still a fragile democracy, but what happened on Thursday is a reminder that we manage to work together and this is the most important,” said Zied Krichen, editor in chief of Le Maghreb, a daily newspaper.

For many Tunisians, Mr. Essebsi came to embody the ability to balance ideology, pragmatism and power in the name of unity, consensus and stability — words he often used in his speeches. When his party did not win an absolute majority in the legislative elections in 2014, he sought consensus with its chief rival, the Islamist Ennahda party.

“Until 2017, before his health got bad, he really played the part of a tightrope walker, making compromise with conservatives and liberals and trying to keep the country steady,” said Youssef Cherif, a political analyst. But, he added, Mr. Essebsi also “had a dark side where he favored more his family and his son rather than the country.”

The president’s son, Hafedh, who took the lead of their party after his father was elected, was seen by many as playing a key role in the crises and high-level resignations that the party has experienced in the past two years.

The elder Mr. Essebsi also promoted women’s rights as president, though Parliament did not take up the final bill he proposed, which would require equality between men and women in inheritance. On Thursday, on social media, some Tunisians asked who would pursue this fight after him.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: In Tunisia, Power Transfer Tests Democracy’s Strength. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe